Green Urban Design And Its Dimension In Regionalism

Based on the current urban design theories and practices, this dissertation proposes a theoretical frame for Green Urban Design, which engages the major problems confronting the current urban environments. It emphasizes on solving the problems of natural ecology and human ecology in urban designs, including urban physical environment design and urban social space research, and the latter one provides an epistemological ground for the former. Through the entire text, the method of comparative analysis has been utilized to articulate the exclusiveness of urban problems in contemporary China, and the vital issues that urban design needs to tackle. The dissertation criticizes the discrepancies of doings such as the current "City Beautiful Movement", stresses the significances of a city's deep social structure for urban design, hence concludes that Regionalism is the pivotal ideas and vital method throughout the theoretical spectrum of Green Urban Design.In the first Chapter, the dissertation reviews the conceptual sources of Green Urban Design, the main Western urban design theories and practices in history, with dialectical analysis on their positive versus negative points and class standpoints, and emphasizes on the significances of social space as the main epistemological content for urban design.The second chapter delineates the ecological philosophy base and fresh aesthetic view of Green Urban Design, solving the relationship issues of man and nature, and technology and nature, reveals the historical determined certainty from the "City Beautiful Movement" to an ecological aesthetics. Meanwhile, originating from the ultimate mandates of ideal city life objectives, the dissertation delineates the city's physical space, natural ecology, and social space, which constitute the three principles of Green Urban Design, form the keystone for detailed design contents of methodology.The following four chapters deal with specific epistemological and methodological details, starting from the city as a general, and moving on to respective sub-systems and special components. The third chapter expounds thephysical model of the "compact city" and the relevant issues such as traffic and density. The next chapter elaborates those main components of green city, including urban spaces and green infrastructure, even matters like techniques, with emphasis on Regionalism design methods. As the key component of Green Urban Design, Chapter Five fully examine the historical preservation and recycling from three aspects, such as sustainable development, unique aesthetic values and detailed design methods.Relatively autonomous, the last chapter deals with the analytical contents of political economics resulted from interdisciplinary studies of urban design and urban sociology, covering social structures, rights and spaces etc. It's the implementations of Western sociological theories on China's contemporary urban space problems. Such research that engages the deep social space structure are to provide the foothold for proceeding urban designs, comprehensively solving conflicts in urban spaces. The dissertation criticizes the encroachments and disturbances on resource distributions of public domains by all sorts of interest groups and state politics, reveals that building a civil society, and maintaining a city public policy with balanced equality and efficiency is essential for constructing a good urban space. Furthermore, both the urban social space problems and the specialties of their remedies put the high light on Regionalism as a cardinal dimension.In the end, the theoritical originality, defect and potential improvement of Green Urban Design Theory are pointed out.This dissertation is written with relatively 210,000 Chinese characters, with about 450 supporting figures and templates.